In one survey, 75% of tech entrepreneurs voted for Hillary Clinton. 8.8% voted for Trump. 83% back higher taxes, 82% support gun control and another 82% are in favor of socialized medicine.
Google, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon employees were 4 out of 5 of Bernie Sanders’ top donors. Cash from Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft poured into the Clinton campaign. $1.6 million was donated by Google employees to Hillary Clinton and Google employee money is still pouring into competitive congressional races in the midterm elections. The same is true across the tech spectrum.
People have a right to their own political views. But that’s an idea that today’s Silicon Valley rejects.
The internet was born through universities, hobbyists and neglected labs. It was experimentally libertarian. Two generations later it’s controlled by a handful of monopolistic tech firms whose leaders and employees are dogmatically leftist.
Most users haven’t cared much as the local BBS and then the forum gave way to centralized platforms like Facebook. But centralization represented a cultural and political shift. Freedom ceased to be part of the internet’s innate technological DNA and instead became an eccentricity that Big Tech temporarily tolerated because it made the tech companies money.
And relying on the tolerance of the adherents of a political movement that had never been noted for its willingness to tolerate the dissenting speech of its political opponents was never going to end well.
The internet was free when control over its medium was diversified. Its message ceased to be free as its core platforms became centralized. Its old model had been innately libertarian. Its new model was just as innately socialist, imitating its old hobbyist culture with free services, but offering those free services in exchange for reselling control and surveillance over the people who were making use of them.
Google, Facebook and other big tech firms tolerated freedom on the internet for a variety of reasons, some cultural, some political and some economic. The old generation of Boomer hobbyists had long since made way for Generation X liberals and millennial lefties, but the culture was still there. Even tech industry lefties have a more libertarian outlook than their peers in other industries. And none of the firms wanted the responsibility of actually censoring their content. Not only is it an expensive and difficult process, but it would make them responsible for what actually appeared on their services.
Even before Trump’s victory, the cultural shift to a millennial activist tech workforce, increasing pressure from Europe and growing desperation by the media over the internet threat were turning points.
European governments had never been comfortable with American tech companies and their permissive attitude toward free speech. As domestic political pressures mounted, nervous governments, especially Merkel’s in Germany, came to view big tech companies as unlicensed media operations that allowed “extremists” to bypass the regulated media with dangerous populist opinions
Meanwhile the media’s business model was already under siege from Google and Facebook. The media had to manufacture a crisis that would force regulation of news content on social media platforms. That crisis arrived in the form of Donald J. Trump. While Clinton’s people blamed their defeat on the Russians, the media seized on the “fake news” angle to blame Trump’s victory on social media misinformation. (Later these two competing narratives were synthesized into Russian bots spreading fake news, but initially the media was blaming the Macedonians, not the Russians.)
The media did not especially care whether it was the Russians or the Macedonians. Its real targets weren’t in Moscow or Skopje, but in Silicon Valley. It had already seen Craigslist wipe out the business models of many local papers. And it feared that Facebook was about to do the same thing to it. And so it whipped up a panic among nervous elites by blaming Trump, Brexit and political populism on the unregulated social media environment on Facebook and throughout the entire internet.
The media isn’t just an ideology. It’s an industry. It was in the business of selling buggy whips, while social media firms were giving away sports cars. But as rattled elites confronted the specter of populism, being in the buggy whip business suddenly had a clear advantage as world leaders trembled at the roar of sports car engines rounding the track. It wasn’t really about the Russians. It was about populism.
The censorship wave has one core problem and one core solution. The political elites, the media and the tech companies are all villains. But centralization made censorship inevitable. Once a small number of interlocking companies gained the power to choke off free speech on the internet, it was only a matter of time until they did it. The triggers discussed in this article are a detail. The ability is the real threat.
Free speech can’t only be protected legislatively; it must also be protected at a technical level.
The First Amendment didn’t create a new ability. It protected an existing one. Without a printing press in every town, freedom of the press would have been an absurdity. Google, Facebook and Amazon’s centralized control over the internet have made the First Amendment into just as much of an absurdity.
Centralized control over speech by any organization inevitably leads to government censorship. The only way to protect freedom of speech on the internet is to decentralize the control of big tech companies. As long as Google, Facebook and Amazon can choke off freedom of speech at a moment’s notice, it’s not a question of whether speech on the internet will be censored, but when it will be censored and why.
The only way to protect freedom of speech is to break up the centralized power of Big Tech.
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